There’s been a lot of doomsday predictions and prophecies over the years (and I mean a lot), and fortunately none of them have ever come true. While I have noticed a lot of things about them, there are five things that I have really noticed about them that tends to stick out.

Every single doomsday prophecy and prediction ever made has always failed to come true, including the big ones that a lot of people believed would happen and were actually preparing for. The most recent example of this is 12/21/2012 ending of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, which many people thought would mark the end of the world, despite the fact that nothing in any Mayan religious texts ever stated this, and even if there was, it wouldn’t have meant that the world was ending anyways…

Thinking about, it’s actually a pretty good thing that these doomsday prophecies and predictions has such a bad track record…

4. They tend to get pushed back.

While sometimes when a doomsday prediction fails it will go away, more often then not they just get pushed back to a later date, or will inspire someone else to make a similar prediction for a later date.

One of the most common types of doomsday predictions to this are the New World Order type of predictions. These are predictions that proclaim that the imaginary “New World Order” is going to take over the world and kill lots of people in the process. These types of predictions have failed every single time to come true, and have been pushed back so many times I can’t even count how many times now, and that’s just from Alex Jones alone…

3. They’re pretty vague.

Most of these doomsday predictions and prophecies are quite vague and often times lack many details, if any.

While some of these predictions will at least say what type of disaster is suppose to occur, sometimes they don’t even do that. This causes people to add in their own details about what is suppose to happen, which often times gets very… strange.

Is the next Pope the last before the apocalypse? Some writings, though discredited, would suggest yes. Regardless of validity, doomsday predictions abound, including end-of-world dates set for 2020, 2040, 2060 and 2080.CREDIT: sdecoret | Shutterstock

Y2K? A bust. Judgment Day 2011? As quiet as a mouse. The Mayan apocalypse? Certainly not now.

Plenty, as it turns out. Previous failures have in no way shut down doomsday predictors, and dates are set for possible apocalypses in 2020, 2040, 2060 and 2080 (zeros have an appeal, apparently). One of these doomsdays was even predicted by Sir Isaac Newton himself.

“It’s clear that these kinds of scenarios return over and over and over again,” said John Hoopes, an archaeologist at the University of Kansas who has studied doomsday predictions.

The end is nigh

Doomsday prophecies date back thousands of years. The ancient Persians kicked off the hobby of apocalypse predicting in the Western world, Saint Joseph’s University professor Allen Kerkeslager told LiveScience in December 2012. When the Zoroastrian Persians conquered the ancient Jews, they passed their end-of-the-world beliefs into Jewish culture, which subsequently handed them to Christianity. Now, everyone from Protestant preachers like Harold Camping, who predicted Armageddon in 2011, to UFO cultists and New Age mystics occasionally jump on the doomsday train.

The most recent apocalypse prediction was tied to the Mayan calendar, even though actual Mayans and scholars who study ancient Maya culture pointed out repeatedly that the calendar was never meant to predict the end of the world. The appointed day (Dec. 21, 2012) came and went without fire and brimstone.

But failures haven’t stopped aspiring doomsday prophets in the past. In one of the most notorious apocalypse failures ever, American Baptist preacher William Miller predicted the return of Jesus Christ on March 21, 1844. Nothing happened, so Miller and his followers revised the prediction to Oct. 22. When that day, too, passed without incident, it was dubbed the Great Disappointment. [Oops! 11 Failed Doomsday Predictions]

Likewise, Camping predicted the Rapture three times in 1994 before his 2011 predictions.

The Pope’s doomsday

So it should come as no surprise that doomsday believers have plenty of dates to fixate on in the future. Friday’s ultimately harmless asteroid flyby may trigger more anxiety about world-ending asteroid impacts in the near future, Hoopes told LiveScience. A Friday morning meteor explosion that shattered windows and injured more than 1,000 in Russia is likely to do the same.

As you may have noticed, last December was not the last month of life on Earth, nor was there some great transformation or spiritual awakening. We still have politicians, right? So I had my fun pointing this out on the alleged moment the end was supposed to come.

Now it has been nearly a month since the lack-of-doom date, and usually there are excuses for why the end did not happen. So I tried to look around the Internet, especially at the recognized websites that promoted the 2012 Apocalypse, such as December212012, 2012Apocalypse.net, and 2012Apocalypse.info. It looks like there is no updates at all since the winter solstice, at least as of now when I am writing this. My searches on Google also didn’t come up with anything much, though there may be something buried in some forum somewhere.

Note: by the time you read this, you won’t need to read this because you’ll know the world didn’t end as some people said it would on December 21, 2012. Doomsday predictions are a dime a dozen. Why anyone believes them is the real mystery.

In a nutshell: The Mayan prophecy for 2012 is something made up by people who don’t know much about the Maya. The Maya didn’t predict anything, much less the end of the world.

The idea that the Maya predicted the end of the world on 12-21-2012 is a hoax.

The Maya had several calendars and one of them starts over in 2012. Some people think this means they predicted the end of the world. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they like to scare people. The Maya didn’t predict the end of the world. But even if they did, so what? The Maya couldn’t even predict the end of their own civilization, which collapsed over one thousand years ago. Anyway, anyone can predict anything about the future. That doesn’t mean their prediction will come true.

Mayan civilization was at its peak for over 750 years in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and parts of Central America. The Maya, like all farming societies, had to study things that affect the soil and the growth of plants. They studied the pattern of the seasons and knew when to plant and when to store up food for the dry months. Their studies led them to create several calendars. We don’t really know much about these calendars. For example, we know that the Long Count Calendar—the one that ends on 12-21-2012—began about 5,000 years ago on August 11, 3114 BCE. We don’t know why the Maya started their calendar on that date and we don’t know why they ended it on 12-21-2012. We don’t even know if 12-21-2012 is the actual date the Long Count Calendar ends. All we know is that the Maya reset this calendar to day 0 every 1,872,000 days, a period known as The Great Circle. We don’t know why they thought this number was important. It’s a big number and amounts to more days than the oldest Egyptian pyramids have been around.

We know that the Maya had a large empire, but they were not able to solve some important problems. They had too many people on too little land. They destroyed their own environment by cutting down too many trees and by farming in ways that ruined their soil. Climate change brought long periods with no rain. Why should we think the Maya prophets would be any better at seeing the distant future than failed prophets of other times and other peoples?

The fact is that anybody can predict the end of the world, but nobody knows when it will happen.

End of the World 2012 Countdown Timer

December 21, 2012: Some predict the end of the world, some predict the beginning of a new era. The basis for these claims is based on the Ancient Mayan calendar. It may seem silly to base a prediction off an ancient civilization‘s calendar but the Mayans were a highly mathematically advanced civilization. Their calendar is not only mathematically complex, it is also highly accurate…

The failed Mayan apocalypse ramblings could be a positive awakening for humanity, but it won’t be. Read on for why I’m not optimistic.

Sorry but I can’t not talk about the supposed Mayan apocalypse hubbub. I just think that we can learn some lessons from this whole thing. I mean, we laughed at Harold Camping for his absurd pronouncements about the end of the world last year (twice as the math was slightly off).

For starters, the Mayans never made such a prophecy. Even if they did — so what!? The obsession with what the Mayans may or may not have said/thought seems in part to be due to the romantic (false) notion that ancient societies were in some sort of wonderful place, in harmony with nature and the cosmos.

My basic premise

Claims such as those made about a mysterious Planet X destroying the Earth or any other…

French officials ban access to sacred mountain which believers claim will be refuge from ‘Mayan apocalypse on December 21′

Rumours say the mountain will burst open on December 21 to reveal an alien spaceship which will save those nearby from the apocalypse

French police will control access to the mountain and village to stop expected hordes of New Age fanatics, sightseers and journalists

December 21 is the estimated end of the Mayan long calendar, which some believes marks the end of the world as we know it

The Pic de Bugarach, south-west France: Online rumours claim that on December 21 the mountain will burst open to reveal an alien spaceship that will rescue those nearby from the apocalypse

Fears the end of the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world this coming December have run rife on the internet in recent years.

Less well known is the rumour that one particular mountain in south-west France will burst open on that day revealing an alien spaceship which will carry nearby humans to safety.

Well, if you were counting on that possibility to save you from the apocalypse, prepare to be disappointed. French officials have banned access to the Pic de Bugarach to avoid a rush of New Age fanatics, sightseers and, above all, journalists.

A hundred police and firefighters will also control approaches to the tiny village of the same name at the foot of the mountain, and if too many people turn up, they will block access there too.

Believers say the world will end on December 21, 2012, the end date of the ancient Mayan calendar, and they see Bugarach as one of a few sacred mountains sheltered from the cataclysm.